


ancestral voices prophesying war

by howlikeagod



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Character Study, Gen, buddy boy is doing both better and worse than he thinks he is, dear ghost of samuel taylor coleridge: i hope u like this, implied violent revolution, post-Final Resting Place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-29
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-10-12 15:50:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10494261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howlikeagod/pseuds/howlikeagod
Summary: Peter Nureyev is halfway through intentionally losing a game of strip poker in a Venusian pleasure palace when he hears the words “New Kinshasa has fallen.”





	

Peter Nureyev is halfway through intentionally losing a game of strip poker in a Venusian pleasure palace when he hears the words “New Kinshasa has fallen.”

There is a long moment where he disconnects from himself. Inside is static, his mind trying to make the leap from the invoked idea of a place--one he’s spent more of his life running  _ from  _ than living  _ in-- _ to the soft music and hazy light and peals of tipsy laughter of his current surroundings, and coming up short. He’s aware, distantly, of his own hands continuing in their quest to remove his undershirt; David Corona is not a shy man, so he keeps smiling.

He hangs in liminality for a moment, then snaps back together. If there is one thing Nureyev can rightfully pride himself on (although a more modest man than he is would still have to admit there are many), it is his ability to compartmentalize. So he does just that, handily winning at his game of losing--but not without an ear out for the conversation unfolding nearby.

“What do you mean,  _ fallen?”  _ asks a voice. They are off to Nureyev’s right, too mired in his periphery to pick out who is saying what. “Not literally?”

“I mean fallen as in  _ kaput,”  _ says the other.

“But like, ‘kaput’ as in  _ done  _ or ‘kaput’ as in, you know…  _ splat?” _

The onamonapeia very nearly makes Peter wince. He plays it off as a wink; the man across from him blushes.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” comes the reply.

“Wait, you know what New Kinshasa  _ is,  _ right?”

“The capital of Brahma, yeah, I’m not an idiot. Jeez.”

_ ‘Home’ _ is a concept Peter Nureyev left behind when he left behind his name, although both have made rather sudden re-emergences of late. Still, it never occurred to him that he might feel something akin to hometown pride, and especially not the wounding of it. Against all odds, therefore, he bristles. He hides it behind David Corona’s abysmal poker face.

“You don’t know shit about the Outer Rim, do you, you bougie bitch.” This is said fondly.

“You’re calling  _ me  _ ‘bougie’? We’re on  _ Venus  _ for  _ vacation  _ and it was  _ your idea!” _

Nureyev can feel them slipping away from the topic at hand. He wants so badly to turn around, call out  _ “did you say New Kinshasa? What in the world is going on out  _ there?”  but David Corona doesn’t care about politics. David Corona was born on Earth, barely knows the major cities of Venus  _ (certainly  _ doesn’t know the major cities of Mars), and should by all rights be too invested in the sweaty, eager man who nearly has him down to his socks to hear the conversation of a couple of strangers.

Nureyev slaps a final, pitiful hand down on the table and looks the man, whose name he has already properly forgotten, dead in the eye.

“Would you care to continue this in your room?”

 

\--

 

Nureyev leaves while the man is asleep--a dose of tranquilizer directly to the neck when he turned around to pour a drink will do that--after he cracks the safe. Once upon a time, it would have been easier to just sleep with him first. Now, the thought barely crosses his mind. 

Nureyev thinks it might be because he’s getting too old for that sort of thing, but only when he’s kidding himself.

He climbs out the window in the early dawn light. The wind high over Venus ruffles through his hair. He takes a moment on the edge of the roof, looking out over the roiling green and purple cloud cover far below. The pleasure palace floats in the upper atmosphere, the first air outside of Earth humans could ever breathe on their own. Deep beneath that, somewhere, are cities on the surface, early terraformed greenhouses of cities, with shields and simwind like--

Like a lot of colonized planets. Like most of them, in fact.

For a man who tries to shed his skin as easily as his coat, Peter Nureyev spends a lot of time reminiscing. It’s not his fault, he doesn’t think; see enough of the universe, and everything will remind you of something. Except when it doesn’t. Except when something is wholly and entirely new, be it due to inexperience or ignorance--or neither, but another, rarer thing.

The universe is vast. Every place and person and moment in time is a singularity unto itself. Peter believes that, he really does. But nothing, even across the emptiness of space, exists in a--pardon the pun--vacuum. It is all so tangled up in itself. Following those threads to where they loop around one another and pull him into the next grand adventure, that’s what his choices have led to.

He wishes suddenly, as the sunrise over Venus heats the back of his neck, that he had someone with whom to share these thoughts. Really share them, not just mine them for pre-prepared witticisms. 

But thoughts like these, turned real by the presence of shared understanding, demand intimacy. And you can’t really love a thing if you aren’t allowed to name it, can you?

He thinks, again, of Brahma.

There’s little chance that whoever managed to bring down New Kinshasa--figuratively, he hopes--did so with the legacy of a teenage terrorist two decades gone in mind. It’s improbable in the extreme that his name lived on, whispered in shadows and across dinner tables and shouted in secret meeting halls. He certainly was not remembered fondly, if he was remembered at all, let alone turned into a rallying cry. One man does not a revolution make, this much he has learned.

But does it hurt to dream?

He finds the stash of clothes right where he left them, behind a transmission box in the middle of the roof. Slipping out of David Corona is like taking off a pair of hideously uncomfortable shoes. The invisibility of an employee uniform is a welcome change, after all that.

The penthouse window is easy to jimmy open. Peter knows the suite itself is empty this morning. He will sneak into the hallway, walk through the building with the simultaneous surety and boredom of a man who has just arrived at work and does not want to be there, and walk right out the front door.

Maybe, on his way through the lobby, there will be a news feed on the monitors. Maybe he will pause and share a glance with other people who are saddened but ultimately untouched by turmoil in the Outer Rim, then continue with his day. Maybe the news cycle has already passed Brahma by.

Peter has a flight to catch, a fence to contact on Titan, two new aliases to finish forging documents for, and a mild headache building behind his eyes. He will take care of all of that, some things sooner than others. But he will keep an ear out, too.

You do not get far in a life like Peter Nureyev’s if you are afraid of what truths you might overhear. Eavesdropping is a cornerstone of his profession. This is a shift, that’s all, a shift in perspective, a rearrangement of the boxes packed up tight in his mind, clearly labeled and color-coordinated.

The sun is a different shade on every planet. Nureyev squints up at the sky as the pleasure palace’s doors slide open before him. 

The sign over his head says “Xanadu,” a reference to an ancient Terran poem. The rhythm of it starts in his head. He matches his footsteps to the beat and thinks, in passing, that Kubla Khan would make a decent alias. 

Or a place to start, at any rate.

**Author's Note:**

> Please come yell at me about Penumbra on tumblr @eternalgirlscout


End file.
